Indian-born Kushal Dutta is the Managing Director, Jovago.com, arguably Africa’s No.1 hotel booking portal. In this interview with Ibrahim Apekhade Yusuf he speaks on the challenges and prospects of e-commerce, his career path vis-à-vis his management style among others. Excerpts:
What prepared you for your job at Jovago.com?
I was educated in India and graduated from Calcutta University. I began my working career in India. I had a brief stint at NIIT in India from 2006-2012. From there, I was appointed as NIIT Business Head in Nigeria, in September 2012.
I have been in Nigeria for more than four years now, and I took over this position last year, precisely in December, 2014. However, my association with Jovago has been for quite some time. Before my appointment as the Managing Director at the Jovago.com, I had worked in different departments within the company. I worked at the Revenue Management. So, it was logical progression to take on more responsibilities as the MD. I’m delighted to lead Jovago Nigeria’s operations. As a team, we are pleased to carry on the vision and continue to increase our impact as Africa’s largest hotel booking platform. I clearly realise the scale of the assignment ahead and we are dedicated to expanding our portfolio within Nigeria, and around the world.
What is your appraisal of the hospitality industry in Nigeria, do you think it has lived up to people’s expectation?
Well, the Nigeria hospitality industry has huge potentials, right now if you see it’s almost a $350million revenue generating sector. But I still say this is just a tip of the iceberg, because it has so much to offer you, we have so much to capture. I was discussing with someone the other day the only fear of the business they capture is the business travelers, but this has nothing to do with tourism, we have a huge opportunity in Nigeria to sell beautiful locations and beautiful hotels just to encourage domestic travelers and international travelers as well, to encourage them to travel more. I have seen trends in Nigeria because there are pretty wealthy people here who has enough money to spend for tourism but they always prefer to travel outside Nigeria when they have to travel but certainly we have sent message to them we try and reach them and tell them that that is not true.
Secondly the wedding industry is a very huge industry in Nigeria, we have promoted wedding locations and you would be surprised to know people who are initially considering to travel abroad they actually changed their plan and now they are doing it here, so we are promoting honeymoon destinations and in all this, these are most of the major event we have promoted.
Do you think the policies and programmes of the current administration encourage business in Nigeria?
Well to be very honest, we would love to see more policies which is in favor of the tourism industry, we haven’t seen anything in the current budget; but am sure it is the first project of the government and they are seeing to it, as for now there are no such policies which is directly helping the tourism sector, so we are hopeful that will come up soon.
Apart from selling hotels, what other programmes do you hope to bring on board?
Jovago.com – Africa’s No.1 hotel booking portal is backed by Rocket Internet, MTN and Millicom, with more than nine years of experience in the e-commerce sector. Jovago.com launched operations in 2013 in Nigeria and has since grown to 40 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and Asia. Currently, company offers more than 200,000 hotels in 211 countries around the world including over 20,000 in Africa.
As for now no, because you know for many industry it is obvious to link hotel booking with flight booking and everything, but right now we are not looking at “Deeping that sea” because of our long term business plans and the market dynamics, we are only into selling hotel rooms for now.
Do you subscribe to any particular management style, what management style works for you?
For management style you will see when you come to my office, it’s a very young organisation but we always ensure we have people who are young and are eager to grow, because we are very aggressive so we always look for people who subscribe to our ideology, of being young and hungry and ready to grow and get highly rewarded for their achievements and can become a future leader tomorrow. And we always believe our management style is very free there is no bureaucracy, it is an open structure, and you can walk up to anybody at anytime and share your ideas it doesn’t matter how much time you have spent in the company, or is your designation high or down, you are always free to walk up to the management and share your ideas; if you have the talent then we will make you shine.
Quite interesting, so talking about motivation, how do you motivate your staffs to be productive?
The motivation comes in different ways. First off, recognition is the biggest way of motivation. When somebody is encouraged to do well and he does well, we have to strongly recognise his performance and make it really a kind of event to look up to; so obviously recognition is very important; that’s one, then two we handsomely reward people through their performance, and number three people who are growing with us, if we see opportunity in them and we always look for the growth opportunity for that person. So we have three things, number one is recognition; two is reward, and the third is giving a long term plan for that person to grow in the organisation. These are the three things that we do, and I think if you take care of these, the person will grow.
Managing people could be quite tasking, how do you reprimand erring staff?
Managing people is not difficult, when you love people. In Jovago we always look for people that we think are like us, and we do not discriminate people based on their cast and color or any orientation; that is the unique thing for us, which binds us together; we are different people but we have one form of trait that we are passionate about Jovago, and we want to achieve the heights.
So what is your customer base at the moment?
The success is immeasurable, if you see the number of people coming to our site that is a direct measurement for you about how popular we have been. When we started, we had about we 20,000 people coming to our site daily, now it is more than a 100,000 coming to our site, so that still tells you that we have grown in terms of people visiting our sites and traffic, and so many traffic in Nigeria you know, and like I said, it’s an online business and there are so many people that don’t have access to internet, so they will just call us up, so there are so many thousands of people who are booking in offline mode, like I said we have been growing up to 20% every month and we have thousands of customers now.
As a manager with a large workforce, how would you describe yourself?
I think I keep my people very close and am very picky about who I hire, because you know once you hire someone it is not fair for you to go back and start rectifying him or her. Hence, when you’re hiring, you should sieve out the people which behaviours are married to what you want to achieve and who can grow in the organisation, because you know that is the challenge most of the startup business faces, like when people cut corners. You must understand that if somebody doesn’t have an opportunity to grow in a business, then this person will not be motivated to give you back.
A person can grow only when he has some of these qualities. It could be leadership qualities, behavioral qualities. And always hire someone who you think can become a leader of tomorrow, because when the business grow. It is not possible for me to go to every desk and tell people what to do, so I need the next level of managers to be so strong. So whatever they are doing should be the right thing. Because when you are a leader, the biggest job of that leader I think is to create another leader and have a group of leaders not only good but are equally better than you do. Because if you hire people who are better than you, then you can be at the beach and business is going on smoothly.
